Street Fighter 6 introduces new rival character Bosch but will he be playable?

Every good fighting game pretty much needs strong rivals to push the protagonists to become stronger, but this case is a bit different.

During their big Tokyo Game Show presentation, Capcom showed off the opening minutes of Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode, which introduced a brand new character to the series in Bosch.

After going through the character creator and doing some basic sparring with Luke, this flashy fighter jumps down to challenge the player.

The included cutscenes make it pretty clear that Bosch is meant to serve as the hot-headed rival in World Tour, which of course sparked the question as to whether or not he’ll actually be playable.

We at least know that he won’t be at launch seemingly because Capcom already shared the 18 characters on the roster in the presentation too, and Bosch was not on that list.

おはようございます。本日もよろしくお願いいたします。ライバルくん事ボシュくんもよろしくお願いいたします。#スト6 #SF6 #カプコンTGS pic.twitter.com/QTQZ9709En

— takayuki-nakayama (@takaNakayama) September 16, 2022

It is pretty unusual though to introduce a brand new character, especially a rival, in a fighting game and not let you play as them.

Street Fighter 6 appears to be a very different beast compared to the rest of the series with the inclusion of World Tour serving as a single-player story mode.

Capcom does have dozens of characters they can populate the streets with, but including such a big world to walk around in, however, means that a bunch of them are not going to be the main stars.

Previous trailers have already appeared to show notable characters in World Tour who are NPCs like Final Fight’s Thrasher and the girl with Chun-Li who is likely Li-Fen.

So it’s looking right now like Bosch will probably end up serving a similar role in SF6, and that’s backed up by him using Luke’s moveset in the footage without anything really unique of his own.

We suspect that means Bosch will travel around and learn from different masters like the player’s custom fighter, getting stronger as the story progresses.

That doesn’t mean the new kid is never going to join the big leagues though since SF6 will surely be receiving a mountain of DLC in the coming years.

If Bosch becomes pretty popular amongst the players too, that’ll increase his odds of making the roster too.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how many characters Street Fighter 6 will pack into World Tour now.